On 2012 Feb 16, at 13:33 , Benjamin Krueger wrote: > I'd like to pose an interesting question to the list. Forbes published an > article today detailing retailer Target's data mining practices. In > particular, Target tracks customer purchase by credit card number (in > addition to, of course, membership cards) and uses that data to glean highly > accurate and often extremely personal data about their customers. They then > use this data to tailor their marketing efforts to individuals. In other > words, the digital realm is invading the real world. > > http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ > > Big data, and the mining thereof, is enabled by IT professionals such as > ourselves. Sysadmins, DBAs, network engineers, and the like, are responsible > for building and maintaining the systems and toolsets that make this kind of > behavior possible. So here's the question: What ethical responsibilities, if > any, do we carry in enabling this kind of data mining? Where are the lines, > and when should we encourage our peers to draw them? > > Already, I've heard the argument that there is nothing for us to do. If we > don't build these systems, we will be fired and somebody else will. I think > that is effectively a punt on an important ethical question and we can do > better than that.
It depends. Come on, you had to know that would happen. Whenever I have a possible ethical question, I first turn to the System Administrator's Code of Ethics, to see if there is something there. The most significant item that I could find which impacts this topic is the Laws and Policies clause and the Social Responsibility clause. It would seem to me that a system administrator who feels strongly about this, should work to encourage updates of laws and policies regarding this. But... In the absence of specific laws of policies prohibiting this (assuming the article is correct and no existing laws or policies were violated), I would state that the SA should register their discomfort with the concept through internal channels (as well as possibly encouraging changes to those internal policies), but that there is no inherent ethical prohibition on the behavior described. If the SA believes very strongly about that situation, that is a decision they must make for themself. I do not see this as something that the SA community as a whole can likely derive a specific ethical precept that has numerous other problems. ---- "The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue." Edward R Murrow (1964) Mark McCullough [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
